


an untamed art

by tonberrys



Series: Quidditch League Fanfiction Competition, Season 6 [6]
Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Character Study, Gen, POV Garrick Ollivander, POV Third Person, Wand lore
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-31
Updated: 2018-07-31
Packaged: 2019-06-19 18:14:55
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,782
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15515706
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tonberrys/pseuds/tonberrys
Summary: For centuries, the Ollivanders have brought a higher form of wandmaking to the British Isles, and for Garrick Ollivander, it has always about more than making the wand or putting the wand in a person's hand, but rather the fascinating interaction of the two - even when that wand lands with one of the world's darkest wizards.





	an untamed art

“Genius breeds a lofty sort of isolation; isolation, in turn, breeds a certain lofty understanding.”

Garrick Ollivander could remember the words of his father, and in his mind’s eye could still see the man hunched over, swathed in taupe-coloured robes, just as he always was. Taupe was the sort of colour that made his father’s skin look earthy in the dim light—akin to the olive wood for which the Ollivanders were named—as he stood like a grand, ashen-brown tree and brushed the twiggy branches of his fingers along wand after wand. Each creation was different in size, composition, and flair. One in a line of many, Gervaise Ollivander was part of a collective legacy that had built upon itself since 382 BC, dedicated to pulling barbarian wand-making ever closer to perfection, to artistry—to genius. Before his ancestors had set up their wand-making stall over a millennium ago, the native witches and wizards would grab whatever wood or core they had a fancy for, shoddily working it into a wand. No care was taken to how the components complemented each other, nor how those materials complemented their owners. Barbaric, indeed… or at the very least, unenlightened.

Just as he had studied the grooves of an olive tree, Garrick had liked to study his father. Day in and day out, Garrick's silvery eyes following each calculated movement as the wood and its chosen core were crafted into something magnificent and unique. Each wand was a new experiment, a marriage between its parts, a new test in the interactions between a magical being and the anchoring conduit through which magic flowed.

“Myriad materials and combinations might be used throughout Europe, even today, but our wands are unmatched. We put the potential for beauty, power, and discovery into the hands of every witch and wizard. It is up to them to determine what they do with it.”

A penchant for the dramatic had always been his father’s way, and the words would float up to the sky like the clouds that hung over their flat above the shop in Diagon Alley. When Garrick was a child, trying to pick apart his father’s words had been much like trying to grasp such a cloud in his fingers. The nuggets of wisdom were often lofty and vague, but for all his father’s pretensions, Garrick had always grasped the heart of it: The connection between wizardkind and wands was paramount—a pairing unlike any other.

Disease set in before the rot of old age could steal away his father’s life. Garrick had been just shy of thirty years old at the time, and his father just thirty more than that. Gervaise Ollivander had died younger than any wizard ought to, but his quest for rare, experimental materials had exposed him to more than a panel of rare woods. The healers had not known how to combat it, and disease cared not for one’s expectation for life expectancy. When at last his complexion paled and withered, Gervaise Ollivander’s skin was the same dusty taupe as the robes he once loved to wear. For some time after, Garrick’s mother could be found planted beside his grave, pale as a birch. The cream-coloured bark of her own skin was more stark than normal against an inky black swath of robes, but it was the shadows of the shop—not the shadows of the trees—where Garrick found his refuge. 

“I am my father's legacy,” Garrick had told himself the first time he opened the shop alone, surrounded by a towering forest of finely-crafted wands, some of which Garrick himself had brought to life.

This was his world, as it was always meant to be.

* * *

August of 1938. The dense heat of summer pressed against the wand shop windows, and through the glass, sunbeams were streaming onto the floor. The day had been a normal one, swarmed by the height of business as a fresh wave of first-year Hogwarts students came to be matched with their companion wands. 

Behind their eyes, Garrick found wonder and excitement, shock and curiosity; in others, he found the self-confidence (some might call it arrogance) of young children who had undoubtedly been learning magic from their parents for years, long before their letters arrived. He saw thoughtful students suited to a beech wand, the adventurous minds of a maple, the confidence of a spruce. Each customer was a puzzle of factors, and with a fire beneath his feet, Garrick pulled option after option down from his shelves for them to try a swish and flick.

“This is where we will get your wand, Tom.”

When Garrick glanced over, he found an unexpected pair in the doorway. Dressed in ash-coloured Muggle clothing, the boy was quite a glum sight to behold. Something about him seemed to stand out from the start, something behind his eyes that didn’t quite sit like the others. As watchful as he was keen, the boy had arrived in the company of Albus Dumbledore, though Garrick wasn’t aware of the great wizard having any descendants to speak of. 

Vaguely, Garrick considered the possibility that it was another orphan Muggle-born, escorted by a professor, as they always were. There had been one about seven years prior. Garrick’s father had sold the girl a lovely aspen wand, unicorn hair core, ten inches even, and rather swishy. She had exuded a certain determination and vigor behind her blue eyes, held back only by the uneven footing of a lost child in a new world.

This boy—Tom—had determination in his manner too, but it was more calculated than the girl's face had been. Vine, perhaps? There seemed to be hidden depths to the child. Or pine, for mystery...

“Welcome, welcome, welcome, my boy. Professor Dumbledore.” Garrick greeted cheerfully. “A new student, I gather?”

“You gather correctly. This is our final stop for the day, the last of his supplies,” Dumbledore answered, though the boy did not look terribly pleased at the prospect of bringing their trip to an end. Many Muggle-born children reacted the same. Magic was so wonderful, so new to them, no doubt. Garrick could see that the contents in Dumbledore’s bag were primarily second-hand, but buying a new wand was the right choice, certainly. When Dumbledore spoke again, Garrick flicked his eyes back up: “I see you have taken over the shop. I'm sorry for your loss, Garrick.”

With a tight smile, more akin to a grimace than anything else, Garrick pushed down that clawing feeling and turned his mind to business once again.

“Let us get started, then.” Turning to pull a box from the nearest shelf, he opened it to reveal a vine wand, decorated with a sort of twisting aesthetic. Tucking the lid beneath the box, he handed it to the boy. “Go on, then. Give it a flick.”

With a such lurch of eagerness, Tom picked up the wand and examined it, then within a beat, had swished it towards the back of the shop.

Nothing happened, and a flicker of annoyance showed on the boy’s face.

“Oh dear. Enthusiastic, are you?” Garrick remarked, taking the wand back. “That's good. Not this one, vine isn't right. Maybe the pine.”

“Why didn't it work?” Tom asked, brow furrowing with a look that bordered on consternation.

“The wand chooses the wizard. That one must be meant for another.” Handing over the second wand, a similar reaction—or lack of reaction, as it was—nixed the pine. A hornbeam wand was next; it was Garrick’s own wand wood, and one that told of passion. A certain passion appeared to be brewing in the boy with each unsuccessful attempt, but it was not hornbeam that chose young Tom.

The next box held a curious choice, and one that had been sitting on the Ollivanders’ shelf for some time now. Fierce and dark though its reputation might be, it held the potential for great things; no timid master would tame it, but however quiet the boy had seemed at first, there was a certain hardness around his eyes that made Garrick more than a little bit curious.

“Yew, thirteen and a half inches, phoenix feather core,” Garrick described as he pulled out the wand, cream in colour with a rather ominous, bone-like hook for a handle. Even just looking at it, young Tom seemed to come to life, and his fingers had scarcely brushed the wood when sparks began spurting from the end in a glorious spread of colour. 

“That is the one,” Garrick said with a look of wonder as the boy’s eyes burned with hunger, shedding for a moment the restrained, statuesque posture he’d been presenting. A strong reaction, it was, for wand and wizard alike, and for such a peculiar wand. “You will do great things, I think.”

Dumbledore’s eyes dropped to peer at the boy, staring at the top of his neatly combed hair, but it was the boy’s intense, dark eyes that held Garrick’s attention. Young Tom did not say anything, then, only curled a small smile onto his lips: an expression the wandmaker did not soon forget.

Garrick Ollivander did not forget, but decades would pass before the memory of that day would grip him anew. His comment to Tom Riddle had been a casual one, but that comment would someday form into a tangible terror... one that would shake the wizarding world to its core.

Great things, but terrible. Terrible things, but great.

* * *

Garrick had once thought the birth of a wand was like the birth of some companion creature—a childish fancy, he had come to learn, because a wand was not a creature at all. A wand was a tool, an extension of the witch or wizard with whom it shared its bond. Garrick was a tool, too, watching the world whirl past; placing power into the hands of the most pure and the most vile; equipping angels and barbarians alike; observing history from his shop, caught in some state between neutral isolation and a sort of tangential involvement in nearly every witch and wizards’ journey.

The wand did not determine the path of the wizard; no, the wizard determined the path of the wand… 

His contribution to history came through the twiggy branches of his own fingers, pale as his mother’s had once been, and quite like the hornbeam wand he wielded, with its grains and grooves. The hornbeam was a wand that spoke of passion, yes. Putting wands into the hands of the masses was his passion; what became of them beyond that door was a fascinating and sometimes horrifying experiment—an art that could not, and would not, be tamed.

**Author's Note:**

> This one-shot was written for Round 6 (Month by Month) of the 2018 Quidditch League Fanfiction Competition, Season 6. I'm writing as a Chaser (3rd Position) for the Wimbourne Wasps.
> 
> Position Prompt: September: Madame Chang, Hermione Granger, **Garrick Ollivander** , Quirinus Quirrell.  
> Optional Chaser Prompt #1: (colour) Taupe  
> Optional Chaser Prompt #2: (word) Barbarian  
> Optional Chaser Prompt #3: (colour) Cream
> 
> I'm also a Slytherin in the Hogwarts School of Witchcraft & Wizardry (Challenges & Assignments).
> 
> Writing Club, Shannon’s Showcase: 9\. (dialogue) “I am my father’s legacy.”  
> Writing Club, Sophie’s Shelf, Vault 81: (word) Experiment  
> Writing Club, Emy’s Emporium, Portugal: 2\. (trait) Loner  
> Writing Club, Lo’s Lowdown, Les Mis: 3\. Write about a Ravenclaw  
> Eastern Summer Funfair, Penny Slot Machine: 38\. (word) Magnificent, 45. (word) Myriad, 48. (word) Perfection  
> Insane House Challenge: 743\. (job) Wand Maker  
> 365 Day Challenge: 178\. (job) Wandmaker  
> Summer Seasonal Challenges, Days of the Year, Sunglasses Day: Write about something happening on a sunny day.  
> Summer Seasonal Challenges, Summer Prompts: (word) Heat  
> Summer Seasonal Challenges, Colour Prompts: (colour) Cream  
> Summer Seasonal Challenges, Fire Element, Fire Prompts: (quote) "From the little spark may burst a mighty flame." - Dante  
> Summer Seasonal Challenges, Gryffindor Themed Prompts, Traits: (trait) Passionate


End file.
